To date Inesol's most ambitious financial system integration is the Finance Workflow application designed for LloydsTSB Pensions. The system,( a web based application running on the Lotus Domino platform), was designed to connect workflow processes in the various different admin teams, scattered across different geographical locations, to a workflow system running in the Finance department.

Although it ran on a Lotus Notes platform the finance system was designed to accept payment requests, status queries and cancellations from any system on the network, including both the existing DB2 system and its replacement based on Oracle. All communications to the system were transmitted as XML transactions, and proccessed by Java servlets.

Due to a high turnover of staff, the finance team themselves wanted a workflow system that would lead them through business processes step by step with stage notes and progress checkboxes. The system automatically calculated the cheapest method to the bank of paying members within the department's SLAs and automatically updated multiple ledgers in the Open Accounts finance system.

Lotus Workflow was used to define the business rules for authorisation and the organisational structure. The ability to make frequent changes to business process without recoding, and the ability to rapidly change which staff authorised which cases, was an important consideration for Lloyds. The application also rendered automatically generated documents to PDF format to be consistant with the bank's paper based processes.

We chose a web interface for the client in order to give them a dynamic and future proof application whilst keeping their rapidly aging infrastructure. Use of DHTML & Javascript allowed for more functionality than the native Lotes Notes interface could provide. The interface was designed as part of a corporate wide "personal desktop portal" allowing alerts, appointments and todo lists from other applications to be incorperated in a modular format onto the same screen.

In a finance process KPI's are fairly quantifiable and we were easily able to monitor the amount of money and time the bank saved with the new system. In the three months that we monitored the application's performance with the bank, the application saved the department over £30,000 through reduced bank charges for payments, fewer missed cut-off dates and interest payments, and a reduction to zero of duplicate payments.